Sega Settles Discrimination Suit With Filipino Game Testers

Thanks to GamePro for its story discussing the $600,000 settling of a discrimination suit brought by Sega game testers who charged that "Sega directed [employment agency] Spherion to terminate the employment of 13 Filipino game testers due to their national origin." Complicatedly, it appears: "The move to fire the Filipino employees stemmed from a complaint of a former employee, who alleged in his exit interview that Sega was giving preferential treatment to Filipinos." Interviews with the testers paint a downbeat perspective of the job, with one of the fired employees saying: "I look around and see some friends who are game testers, and I talk to a couple of people who are in the industry, and what I get from other people is that game testers... are almost disposable."

Comments

Say it ain't so

[b00m3rang]

"I look around and see some friends who are game testers, and I talk to a couple of people who are in the industry, and what I get from other people is that game testers... are almost disposable."

You mean, there's no shortage of people willing to play video games for a living? How could this be?

Re:Say it ain't so

[Dixie_Flatline]

QA usually consists of tasks like, "Open and Close this dorr 1000 times, and see if anything breaks", or "Walk over this trigger 500 times and see if the server and client fall out of sync."

It's hard work, but it's not usually SKILLED work, in the sense that you don't need a lot of special training beforehand. I'm SUPER appreciative of our QA staff, but it's not something that you need a degree for. What you DO need is attention to detail, the ability to do monotonous tasks for hours on end, and a willingness to put up with annoying programmers like me that say that the bug can't be reproduced and that you're on crack for suggesting that it's still in the game. :)

I wouldn't say that QA is 'disposable'. It especially wouldn't be considered that if people knew what the job was like. It ruins a lot of people's ability to play and enjoy games. It really changes your outlook on life, from what I hear. You notice the flaws in everything, and see where OTHER QA departments have failed.

Former Sega Employee

[Propeller Arena]

This is my second post ever to /. As you can tell by my nickname, the last post I submitted was about "Propeller Arena," a cancelled Sega game.

In any case, I'd like to toss in my two cents about this whole deal. First of all, the fired employee who threatened a lawsuit in the first place is Steve Peck. I'll say it again, just so everyone knows. Steve Peck. That's the correct spelling.

Steve Peck is well known throughout the industry for his fanatic love of all things Sega. No kidding. He has a Sonic the Hedgehog tattoo. It's on his leg, if I remember right.

Now, I'm not trying to bash the guy, but he's quite an ass to work with. First off, he's by far the loudest mouth in any office I've worked in in the last 10 years. When he wanted someone's attention, he'd scream at the top of his lungs. He'd frequently do things like pass gas in other employees' cubes. While this may be amusing, the putrid ensuing stink wasn't. He'd also do this in front of new employees, thus showing them that it's okay to be a complete ass at work. He'd also incite pointless Mac vs PC arguments when he should have been working. What do you think your employer would do if they knew you were debating as opposed to working?

The main reason he was fired, and John Amirkhan told me this at the time of his firing, was because Peck decided he wasn't rich enough. Peck was falsifying his hours on his time sheets. Naturally, he was caught and fired. Steve, being the jerk he is, decided he couldn't let Sega management seperate him from his precious position as a game tester, so he threatened the lawsuit. In a blatantly knee-jerk reaction, Sega management proceeded to:

- Fire the test department management
- Fire all of Steve's acquaintances
- Fire pretty much everyone who was Fillippino

That was Sega's mistake. But this pretty much all stemmed from some total ass who couldn't tolerate the fact that the company he so adored wasn't going to pay him to sit around the office (or as the case may be, NOT sit around the office.)